Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
ALAN BENNETTSometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT